PKP Warsaw 2026: Users & Notifications

At the PKP Warsaw 2026 Sprint, the User Notifications Settings group redesigned OJS notification and email controls, fixing bugs and improving clarity for editors.

Group Members

Kristin Ameis, SUB Hamburg, Germany
Radek Gomola, Charles University Karolinum Press & Palacký University Press
Josef Dan Karlsson, NTNU Norway
Antti-Jussi Nygård, The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (Note Captain)

Abstract

This working group examined challenges in the OJS user notification settings, focusing on unclear UI design, inconsistent behavior, and underlying bugs affecting notifications and email preferences. The group reviewed existing documentation and GitHub issues, identified usability and technical problems, and proposed a redesigned interface in which notification and email settings are separated and independently controlled. The work included drafting improved user documentation and creating GitHub issues and a pull request to address the identified bugs and interface shortcomings. The proposed changes aim to make notification management more transparent, predictable, and user-friendly across various roles and journal contexts.

Background

Many users find automatic notification emails distracting, and being able to easily and clearly disable them matters to them. At the time of the sprint, the notification settings interface was unclear: users struggled to determine what disabling a notification actually meant, and how that related to disabling the corresponding email. The group also noted signs of underlying bugs affecting these settings, separate from the interface confusion itself. These two threads — interface clarity and technical correctness — shaped the group’s approach for the sprint, leading it to review documentation and existing GitHub issues before proposing changes.

Goals

• Review existing documentation and GitHub issues related to notification settings.
• Identify and investigate the challenges present on the notifications settings page.
• Propose a clearer interface design for controlling notification settings.
• Draft prototype user documentation describing the redesigned notification settings.
• Create GitHub issues for identified bugs and for the proposed interface changes.

Results

Documentation gaps. OJS 3.4 documentation explains three user actions: enabling in-app notifications, opting out of the matching email, and unsubscribing via an email link. OJS 3.5 documentation covers the same ground more briefly. The group found that while email templates are documented for administrators, notifications themselves are not explained in the technical documentation.

Known issues. GitHub issues #4115 and #12725, filed years apart, raise the same complaint: notifications and emails are conflated, wording is misleading, and the two controls should be independent. Issue #8431 notes that some notification toggles have no corresponding in-app notification, making them “dead” controls affecting only email.

Interface problems. The group confirmed that notifications and emails are worded inconsistently, that disabling an email currently requires enabling its notification, and that users see notification types regardless of role.

Bugs. The group traced three bugs: a site-level settings page that saves but never actually applies; inconsistent checking of notification versus email settings across the codebase; and a context-isolation bug where opting out of a notification in one journal incorrectly excludes a user from that notification across all journals.

Proposed redesign. The group’s alternative UI presents notification types in a table with fully independent notification and email columns, consistently worded, with an explanatory note at the top of the page. This work is captured in pull request #12770. The group also drafted prototype documentation describing the new settings and their behavior.

GitHub issues filed. The group opened issues #12768 and #12769 covering the bugs and proposed interface changes.

Next Steps

• Test the fixed code and new settings across all notification types.
• Investigate displaying notification types based on user role and context.
• Submit pull requests to fix the bugs identified during the sprint.
• Finish and clean up pull request #12770, implementing the redesigned interface.

Read the full notes here.